The Pulpit Commentary — Romans — Section 68

the cBuse it ie hie profeeeed busineee to further and to advocate. To him is committed, ne it were, the custody of monotheism; he ie called upon to witness to the Divine nnture Bnd charncter, as contrasting with the conceptions of their deities cherished by tbo heathen. And lo I he becomes, by his immorality, the occasion of God being dis- honoured, of God'e Name being blasphemed among the Gentiles. The parallelism may be traced between the unfaithful Jew and the unfaithful Christian. III. CONDEMNATION IB PRONOUNOED. 1. Privilege avails not. It is in human nature to rely upon the enjoyment of great advantages. -But the truth is, that the possession of privileges heightens responsibility. No man can be saved because he pleads that the light shone brightly round about him; the question must be-Did be walk in the light while he ha.d the light? Circumcision did not save the Jew; similarly, mere outward participation in the sacraments of Baptism and Lord's Supper will not save the professing Christian. The possession of privileges is no proof of their due and proper use. 2. The less favoured may, in character and life, excel the more favoured. 'l'he uncircumcised may keep the Law which the circumcised allows himself to break. This fact was seen and stated by the Lord himself, who continually warned his fellow-countrymen that many should come from the ea.st and the west, and should sit down in the kingdom of God, whilst they should be thrust out. 3. The highly privileged who are unfaithful to their trust shall, it is foretold, be judged by those whose advantages have been fewer, but who have ma.de a good use of such as they enjoyed. It must have astonished the Jew of repute and standing to be told that be should be judged by those of the uncircumcision. Yet this was quite in harmony with the warning of the Divine Saviour that the men of 'l'yre and Sidon should rise up in the judgment against the unfaithful of his generation. Vere. 28, 29.-The religi011, of the.flesh exchanged/or the rel.igion of the spirit. It is difficult for us to understand all that was meant by this assertion. The apostle wa.s a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and we know, from the general tenor of his writings, how highly he valued the religion in which he had been trained, and how warmly he was attached to the race from which he sprang. That those who remained Jews in faith, who gloried in having Abraham as their father, and who prized as their own peculiar possession the covenant and the oracles of God,-that they would experience a shock of surprise and resentment upon reading such language a.s this, is evident. And even those who had accepted Jesus as the Messiah for the most part retained much of their hereditary confidence in the special privileges of their nationality ar..d their religion. Such teaching as this undoubtedly introduced a revolution into the heart uf reii::;iuus society-a revolution in thought, and a revolution in practice. I. A l'ROTEST. There is often no possibility of avoiding conflict and opposition in expounding and maintaining the trnth. Paul was certainly not the man to shrink from controversy; his was the nature of the warrior, and when he found himself face to fa.ea with error and sin, his nature was roused to its depths, his native combativ&- ness found a oongenial field of battle. And although Christianity was indeed the development and the fulfilment of Judaism, it could not but come into conflict mth much which human nature had connected with Judaism by bonds not easily to be broken. Spiritual as were the intuitions of the inspired psalmists and prophets in whose writings the Hebrew people gloried, it is clear that, at the time of our Lord's ministry, religious formalism was prevalent among the Jewish leaders ::m,l the Jewish people. Scribes and Pharisees we!'e too often hypocrites. Religion was too much an affair of rituBl and oeremonial observnuce. Even those who drew near unto God with their lips were deserving of censure, because their hearts were far from him. Now, the four Gospels make it pll\in to us that the ministry of Christ was a miuistry of protesi against a religiou of form. He would not have directed so much of his teaching against the religion of the letter, had he not seen and felt the necessity of such an attitude of opposition, such action of controversy. And, indeed, he was perfectly awan~for he know what was in man-that the evil wos one not simply of Jewish b:\bit, but of human nature. Where is the religion, however spiritual iu tho apprehensic,n c1f its truo expositor, which has not dcgenemtcd into formalism? Mau's nnture is bcxlily as well as spiritual; his religion must express itself, or it will die; words and outwaro 1'orehip, organization and official action, &ll seet11, if not essential, yet contributive to 62 THE EPISTLE OF PAUL TO TIIE ROMANS. [oH. n.1-29,